Fame (7 page)

The elevator is ancient, the suspension cables above the car groan, and as she goes up, she understands that until this moment she’d never believed she would set foot in this house.
The car stops, the door glides open, and there appears out of nowhere, as if to prevent her from pushing the button that will take her back down again, a thin man with a center part in his hair. “Good day, my name is Freytag.”

And now?

I know I should tell it all. Rosalie walking through the anteroom to the inner room in which the dying is done. The table; the chair; the bed, I should describe them, I should paint a picture of the battered furniture, the strange layer of dust on the little wall cupboard, the general air of a place that’s both used and uninhabited, as if it were the home of shadows, not people. And of course the camera; I should mention the camera, installed to document that the terminally ill patients drink the poison themselves, that nobody forces them, the association has to cover itself legally. I should recount how Rosalie sits down and props her head on her hands, how she looks out of the window for one last sight of the endless foggy expanse of sky, how fear gives way to exhaustion, how she—here, please, and here, and again here—signs forms, and how the glass of poison is finally set down in front of her. I should describe how she lifts it to her mouth, I should conjure up the mixture of aversion and longing as she looks at the watery liquid, her brief hesitation, because she could still turn back and, even if for a matter of days, choose life with all its pain and all its adversities, but then she decides against this—she’s come too far, she’s too close to the threshold to turn back. I should also describe the last wave of her memories: games at the edge of a peaceful
lake, the moist kiss of a motherly woman, her father behind the Sunday paper, the little girl who sat next to her at school, and a boy she hasn’t thought about since back then, and the bird in a cage at her grandmother’s that could enunciate several words quite clearly. Nothing, if truth be told, in the intervening seventy-two years, has ever fascinated her as much as that talking creature.

Yes, it could have made a really good story, a little sentimental, granted, but with humor to counterbalance the melancholy, the brutality offset by a touch of philosophy. I had worked the whole thing out. And now?

Now I ruin it. I tear the curtain aside, I become visible, I appear by Freytag’s side at the door to the elevator. For a second he looks at me uncomprehendingly, then he turns pale and vanishes like dust. Rosalie, you’re cured. And while we’re at it, be young again. Start from the beginning again!

Before she can even respond, I’ve disappeared again and she’s standing in the elevator that’s grinding its way back downstairs and cannot grapple with the fact that a twenty-year-old woman is looking back at her out of the mirror. Slightly irregular teeth, hair a little sparse, neck too thin, she never was a beauty, but I can’t give her that as well. Although, on the other hand—why not! It’s not important anymore.

Thank you.

Ah, I say, exhausted, don’t celebrate too fast.

She pulls open the front door and bounds out into the street on legs that no longer hurt. Her clothes look peculiar
on her: a young girl dressed like an old woman. Because the taxi driver doesn’t recognize her, he doesn’t stop her, he’s lost his fare and will still be standing here half an hour later, watching the meter keep ticking with rising concern, and finally banging on every door in the building. At the association they tell him that they were indeed expecting an old lady but that she hadn’t bothered to keep her appointment. He will go off cursing and this evening will shovel down his wife’s wretched cooking, even more taciturn than usual. It’s long been in his mind to kill her, with a knife or his bare hands, but today’s the day he decides to go through with it. But that’s another story.

And Rosalie? She goes down the street, taking great strides, half unconscious with euphoria, and for a moment I feel I’ve done the right thing, as if mercy were all-important and one story less didn’t matter. And at the same time, I have to confess, I have an absurd hope that someone someday will do the same for me. For like Rosalie I cannot imagine that I’m a nothing if I’m not being observed by somebody else, and that my only half-real existence ends the moment that that somebody takes his eyes off me—just as, now that I’m finally ending this story, Rosalie ceases to exist. From one moment to the next. Without any death throes, pain, or transition. At one instant an oddly dressed girl in a state of happy confusion, now a mere undulation in the air, a sound that echoes for a few seconds, a memory that bleaches itself from my mind and from yours as you read this paragraph.

What remains, if anything, is a street in the rain. Water
pouring off two children’s ponchos, a dog over there lifting its leg, a yawning street sweeper, and three cars with unknown number plates rounding the corner as if they were coming from a long way away: out of another unknown reality or at least out of another story altogether.

The Way Out

I
n the early summer of his thirty-ninth year, Ralf Tanner the actor began to feel he didn’t exist.

From one day to the next, phone calls stopped. Friends of long standing vanished from his life, business plans collapsed for no good reason, a woman he’d loved insofar as he was capable maintained that he’d mocked her cruelly on the telephone, and another, Carla, suddenly surfaced in a hotel lobby to make the worst scene he’d ever undergone in his life: three times, she screamed, he’d stood her up three times in a row! People had stopped, grinning, to watch, a few of them had filmed it all on their cell phones, and already in the very moment Carla had hit him with all her strength, he knew that these few seconds would make it onto the Internet and eclipse the fame of his best films. Shortly after that, he was forced to part with his German shepherd because of allergies and in his distress he shut himself up to paint pictures that he didn’t dare let anyone see. He bought albums of photographs
of the designs on the wings of Central Asian butterflies, and read books on how to dismantle and reassemble watches without ever daring to try it himself.

He began to google his own name several times a day, corrected the Wikipedia entry on himself that was riddled with errors, checked the casting in his films in various databanks, and laboriously translated the opinions of participants in forums about them from Spanish, Italian, and Dutch. Absolute strangers got into fights in these forums about whether he really had split definitively with his brother years before, and he, who had never been able to stand his brother, read their views as if there might be a chance he’d find in them the answer to his existential crisis.

On YouTube he found the tape of a performance by a pretty good Ralf Tanner impersonator: a man who was almost his double—with a voice and gestures to match. On the right of the screen, the system offered a list of links to other videos connected with his name: clips from his films, two interviews, and of course the scene with Carla in the hotel lobby.

That evening he went out with a woman he’d been chasing for a long time. But when he was sitting opposite her, he suddenly found it impossible to pretend that her chatter interested him. The glances from people at the other tables, their whispering, and the direct staring, all disturbed him more than usual. As they got up to leave the restaurant, a man came up to ask for an autograph with the usual mixture of shyness and insistence.

“I only look like him, that’s all,” said Ralf.

The man eyed him suspiciously.

“It’s my job. I do it onstage. I’m an impersonator!”

The man let them pass. The woman found his answer so funny, she was still laughing minutes later in the taxi.

That night, watching in the gray mirror as their two naked silhouettes merged, he wished himself with all his heart transported to the other side of its flat surface, and the next morning, as he listened to her breathing peacefully beside him he felt some stranger had wandered into the room by accident, and the stranger wasn’t her.

He had long suspected that the act of being photographed was wearing out his face. Was it possible that every time you were filmed, another person came into being, a less-than-perfect copy that ousted you from your own presence? It seemed to him that after years of being famous only a part of him survived, and all he needed to be whole again was to die, and to be alone in the place he truly belonged: in films and in his myriad photographs. That body, the one that still breathed, felt hungry, and wandered around for no good reason, would cease to be a burden to him—a body that in any case bore little resemblance to the film star. So much work and so much makeup, so much effort and remodeling went into making sure that he really looked like the Ralf Tanner on the screen.

He called Malzacher, his agent, canceled the trip to the Valparaiso Film Festival, then set off to a discotheque called Looppool on the outskirts of town, where, according to what
he’d found on the Internet, there was going to be an appearance by famous actors’ doubles. He told his chauffeur to wait outside, and went in, feeling shyer than he had in years. Someone wanted an entrance fee, but, when he saw Ralf’s face, waved him on in.

It was hot and sticky, the light harsh and flickering. Over at the bar was a man who looked like Tom Cruise, Arnold Schwarzenegger was clearing a path through the crowd at the other end, and of course there was a Lady Diana in an outfit straight from a discount store. People turned as he went by, but their glances were brief and unfocused, slightly indifferent. Diana now climbed up onstage and sang “Happy Birthday, Mr. President”; there was obviously some mix-up, but the crowd roared its approval. A woman smiled at him. He looked back at her. She came toward him. His heart began to thump, he didn’t know what he should say. She was at his side and then they were on the dance floor, her body pressed close to his.

Shortly after that he found himself up onstage. People stared up at him as he did his famous dialogue with Anthony Hopkins from
I’m the Man in the Moon.
He did the Anthony part really well, but stumbled a bit in his own replies. The audience clapped and whooped, he jumped back down into the room, and the woman he’d been dancing with whispered in his ear that her name was Nora.

The owner of the discotheque tapped him on the shoulder and gave him fifty euros. “That was okay, though not terrific. Tanner talks differently, and he holds his hands sort of like
this.” He demonstrated. “You look like him, but you haven’t got his body language yet. Watch more of his movies! Come back next week.”

As he and the woman stepped out onto the street, he panicked. He couldn’t take her home with him. The moment she saw the house and the servants, she’d know that he wasn’t who he claimed he was—or, rather, that he really was. He pretended not to see the waiting chauffeur, flagged down a taxi, invented something about a brother who was visiting right now; with a look that told him she didn’t believe a word and assumed he must be married, she said her apartment was in a mess.

It was in fact small and extremely tidy, and Ralf Tanner spent the last night of his life there. It wasn’t him but someone else who clasped Nora’s body with a strength he’d never possessed before. In the early dawn she stroked his neck and told him he was wonderful. Many women had said this to him before, but he knew none of them had meant it.

Next day, under the name Matthias Wagner, he rented a furnished room in a rather drafty house not far from where she lived. The landlord looked at him with stupefaction, but Ralf explained that he moonlighted as an impersonator, and that apparently did it. He spent the whole week either there or with Nora, or walking up and down the street enjoying the fact that nobody turned to look, because word had spread around the neighborhood as to who he was and what he did.

Next time he appeared onstage at the Looppool, however, he didn’t make such a good impression. As he stood there
speaking his lines, he suddenly felt totally lost. Something was going wrong, he was tensed up, his voice sounded choked, and when he tried to remember how he’d held his hands in that particular scene, he no longer knew how it had been, what he’d felt and thought, all he saw was the image of himself on the screen. He could sense the audience’s attention slipping away, and only his actor’s instinct made him finish the scene.

Then he saw the other Ralf Tanner impersonator. He knew from YouTube that he’d achieved an impressive level of perfection, but the likeness was even more astounding in person. His handshake was firm and he had the penetrating look that Ralf recognized as his own from the big screen. He was tall and broad-shouldered and radiated strength, inner balance, and courage.

“You haven’t been doing this long,” he said.

Ralf shrugged.

“I’ve been doing it since his second film. At the beginning I was just an amateur, I was still working in the Lost and Found. Then his career took off and I handed in my notice.” The man looked at him with narrowed eyes. “Are you going to make this your main job? It’s hard—it takes lots of practice. To be able to interpret someone, you have to live with them. Often when I’m in the street I don’t even notice that I’m doing Ralf Tanner. I
live
as him. I think like him, sometimes I stay in character for days at a time. I
am
Ralf Tanner. It takes years.”

The owner of Looppool only wanted to give him thirty
euros this time. He hadn’t really stood out, and the physical likeness wasn’t there yet.

For a moment Ralf boiled with rage. He looked him straight in the eyes and the other man must have felt the force of a stare he knew from a dozen movies; he took a step back, looked down at the tips of his shoes, and muttered something incomprehensible. His hand slid into his pocket and Ralf knew that he was about to pull out another banknote. But then he felt his strength drain and the rage passed. He said he was just a beginner still.

“Okay.” The man gave him a mistrustful look and the hand came out of the pocket empty.

“I’ll really try,” said Ralf. Something about this pleased him. Wasn’t it proof that he was finally free?